Roadmap Ideas - 2022 Q1/Q2

[djschny]

This issue will serve as initial recommendation and outline for curriculum updates and creation for beginning of 2022 for KubeAcademy.

Focus Areas

If we are to look across what we have currently, the top areas of focus would be as follows:

• Analytics/Insight Improvements
• Curriculum Maintenance / Additions
• Contributor Improvements
• Events

Recomnended Approach

Analytics/Insight Improvements

Surveys

KubeAcademy Tracking

Independent Dashboard

Curriculum Maintenance / Additions

Learning Paths

As the course list grows for Kube Academy, the Learning Path approach will help guide people. I feel we should lean heavier into this for 2022 in the following ways:

• Add more Learning Paths (both existing and new content). Since we don't track or Learning Path completion (only at the course level) if we need to adjust or change/remove Learning Paths through
• Showcase Learning Paths on the front page. Currently we just have some Most Popular courses there but they really are just the most popular because they have been on the site the most and we have links to them all over.

Address Overlapping Content

With the addition of the Kubernetes Core Concepts Learning Path, there is now a somewhat overlap of introductory content. Content that was initially launched when KubeAcademy launched like:

• Containers 101
• Kubernetes 101
• Getting Started with Kubernetes
• Hands-On with Kubernetes and Containers

The first three above are video only and the last one is lab only.

Some ideas here to help can be items such as:

• Keep Hands-On with Kubernetes and Containers but replace the lessons to instead have the first two labs from Kubernetes Core Concepts. The lab content in those is much more self-teaching and has more content. This also means that if a person took this course and then took the Kubernetes Core Concepts learning path, it would show the lessons as completed already for them.
• Remove 101 from the course titles and/or remove courses and then introduce and reuse lessons. If we have 101 then can introduce as formal field/concept in KubeAcademy.

Platform Course(s)

Currently we have the following platform courses:

• Building Application Platforms with Kubernetes
• Kubernetes Platform Security
• Cluster Operations

There is some overlap between these and there is also a desire to work on a platform course that blends nicely with the Tanzu platform/suite. Options here can be items such as:

• Create Kubernetes Platform Learning Path and include these or others
• Look to remove redundant parts from above and add missing parts
• Add capstone course to end of Learning Path that includes the above and adds some more Tanzu pieces.

Contributor Improvements

GitHub Documentation and Contribution Guide

The KubeAcademy GitHub org has two main repos:

• backlog
• onboarding

Making it clear how to navigate between the two and how to both contribute and onboard.

Community Interaction

Exploring the ability to have a public email distro or Slack Channel for folks to interact and ask questions would be nice to start. We can work on requesting a channel on the Kubernetes Slack area when we feel the time is right.

Lab Creation Automation

This goal would allow quicker and easier creation of lab content on KubeAcademy and allowing people to deploy updates to their courses in Staging without the need for internal access to KubeAcademy systems. This would be a combination of:

• Lab Template Project
• GitHub/GitLab Action workflows

Events

Lab Demo and Q/A

We pick courses that have heavy labs in them already (for example the Kubernetes Core Concepts Learning Path) and we progressively go through the course. The idea is we advertise that people are to watch the recorded lecture ahead of time and potentially do the lab. Then during the Webinar, we say some opening remarks, field some Q/A and then go into doing the lab for the associated lecture live and then close with more Q/A.

Prepared new demos and Q/A

Much of the KA content doesn't have labs, in this option we pick a course or learning path that doesn't. For each session we again advertise that people are to watch the recorded lecture ahead of time. We can prepare some demo's to go along with the content and then at the Webinar can do opening remarks, field Q/A, do the prepared demo, and close with more Q/A.

The following two courses (and subset of lessons in them, would be good candidates for the new prepared demo approach):

Building Application Platforms with Kubernetes

• Creating the platform requires both creating a kubernetes cluster and installing cluster wide services so good candidate.
• TCE has updated versions that have more features and are more polished than at the time of launch of the course.

Cluster Operations

• Similar to above, majority of activities require administrator privileges.
• The course has been out for a while and the demos that are in it have quite older versions of the software that we could update with newer versions